JasonParis
Moderator
Three MMP articles from this week's NOW...
Broken-down ballot
Cashless bid for proportional rep could go bust
By GLENN WHEELER
The yes campaign for proportional representation on which so many hopes are pinned is confused, underfunded and short-staffed, a sign that Liberal strategy is playing out exactly as planned.
There's a growing sense among fans of MMP (mixed member proportional) that the referendum is over before it has really begun and that energy for change is better spent elsewhere.
Certainly, the feeling at Yes provincial campaign HQ at Queen and Spadina is less than ebullient. Larry Gordon, manager of the Yes team, says he has volunteers working across the province trying to sway the electorate in favour of PR. He's not sure how many, perhaps 500 to 1,000 barely more than a large riding campaign.
The nub of the problem is that the Liberal government, after funding the Citizens Assembly on Electoral Reform that generated the voting proposal, decided it would provide no monetary support for the MMP referendum effort itself. This, in the government's view, is the way to preserve the non-partisan citizen nature of the referendum campaign.
But the result has been a people's movement struggling to compete for attention amidst the noise made by big-dollar party campaigns.
Gordon, for example, has started begging online for contributions of $10.10 for victory on election day, October 10. "We are a grassroots organization running a grassroots campaign," he tells me.
So shouldn't politicians supporting MMP do some noisemaking themselves? Turns out this is more complex than it seems.
Gordon himself hasn't encouraged the parties to get more involved. "Democratic renewal is not a partisan issue," he insists. "In downtown Toronto, the party that's penalized the most (by the current system) is the Tories."
Of the three major parties, only the NDP officially supports the proposal. Though that puts the party on the side of the angels, it does mean it's in a delicate situation.
On the one hand, concerned NDPers, knots of whom you'll find at party events, are asking worriedly how badly they think the referendum campaign is going and whether Howard Hampton should be doing more to push the dream that looks increasingly likely to stay exactly that.
On the other hand, if the NDP leader is too vocal, he might give MMP the kiss of death. The challenge, many NDPers reason, is to favour the proposal without inadvertently making it appear that MMP is a socialist-Green plot. One of Hampton's handlers says the leader responds to questions when asked, but won't likely make MMP one of the six key campaign planks.
Individual candidates are pushing MMP as best they can. In Beaches-East York, Michael Prue says he's been getting an average of three calls a day asking about the MMP plan, as hot as issues get in an election campaign.
But besides the positioning issue, there are Elections Ontario rules to contend with. An Elections Ontario official explains to me that parties can express their point of view on MMP, but only groups registered as Yes or No committees can actually ask people to vote for or against the proposal.
The NDP, party organizers say, is doing as much as it can under the election expenses law.
The Yes side's burden got a little heavier last week when Publications Ontario (the provincial printing service) stopped printing and distributing bulk copies of One Ballot, Two Votes, the pamphlet of the Citizens' Assembly on Electoral Reform.
Now, not only does the Yes team have to haul in the votes, but it also has to do the educational backfill it assumed mass distribution of the pamphlet would take care of all on a budget of just over $30,000, the amount raised through donations.
Marco Monoco of the government's Democratic Renewal Secretariat tells me that 500,000 copies of the pamplet have been distributed, and while no more will be printed, it is downloadable from the Internet.
Wading through the Queen's Park media labyrinth seeking answers, I'm shocked by what I'm forced to explain. "What is the Yes team?" one staffer asks. I find myself having to give a primer on the referendum process. If even the media thingies are barely aware of what this is about, what hope is there for the ordinary voter?
The confusion may all be good news for the Grits. Way back in 2003 when they campaigned on democratic renewal, PR seemed like a good way to keep despots like Mike Harris from ever again wielding unchecked power.
But then the Libs found themselves in government even though they received barely more than 40 per cent of the votes. When you're the beneficiary, the unfairness of the first-past-the-post system doesn't seem so bad. So when an all-party committee of the legislature recommended that MMP should be adopted if it received a simple majority, Dalton McGuinty's cabinet thought otherwise. It raised the requirement to at least 60 per cent of the votes in 60 per cent of the ridings.
"It's disgusting," sniffs Prue, the NDP critic for democratic renewal.
If by some fluke, MMP does pass, a Liberal government will certainly bring in legislation to make it happen, Health Minister George Smitherman tells me while canvassing in Toronto Centre-Rosedale.
Smitherman, one of the few leading Liberals to back the MMP option, says the NDP is spending too much time complaining about the referendum process and too little talking up the merits of MMP. "The 60 per cent threshold is appropriate for a change as significant as this," he says.
As for the cash-starved Yes side, Smitherman says the government's strategy has been to direct funds to Elections Ontario to provide non-partisan education about the referendum.
Meanwhile, he says he's four-square behind MMP, and his lit says so. "It would lead to a more representative legislature," he says. "Now, we don't have a single Aboriginal member."
It's a strategic position for a future Liberal leadership contender who wants to be associated with a progressive position on democratic renewal.
Perhaps the best we can do is console ourselves by seeing the expected outcome on October 10 not as defeat but as victory delayed.
Mark Your Ballot MMP
The referendum on October 10 will ask voters to choose between the current first-past-the-post system and a new mixed- member-proportional (MMP) one. Here's the dish on MMP:
• Voters cast two votes on one ballot, one for a local MPP as currently and one for their preferred party. The two votes can be for different parties.
• Parties need to get 3 per cent of the popular vote province-wide to qualify for at-large seats.
• Parties elect a list of at-large MPPs that is published before the election.
• The legislature consists of 129 seats: the current 103 local ridings are reduced to 90, and 39 seats for at-large party list candidates are created.
• If the number of a party's elected candidates is less than its share of the overall vote, it gets a top-up of MPPs.
And they call this democracy?
Not one of the candidates I have voted for has won
By MIKE SMITH
I've voted in every election I could, and not one of "my" candidates has ever won. By the logic of our democracy, I've had no voice, not even my own little decibel in someone else's.
Ontario expat and Fair Vote Canada member Steve Withers commiserates. "I started voting at 18," he tells me in the lounge of the progressive space called the Centre for Social Innovation on Spadina.
"I would've been better off going to the beach for all the effect it had – so that's my formative experience as a citizen of a democracy: my vote actually doesn't matter."
At 24, he left for New Zealand, where Kiwis were mulling a switch from the traditional first-past-the-post system to a proportional one – Multi-Member Proportional, or MMP. MMP got the nod.
Ontarians will be asked to consider the same on October 10, though you'd be forgiven for not knowing it. Withers came here to work with the Citizens' Assembly on Electoral Reform to get the word out, motivated by his experience in New Zealand. The change there, he says, "opened the floodgates to all sorts of ideas and possibilities that the previous system had simply blocked, precluded."
Under MMP, voters get one ballot and two votes: candidates are still elected in local ridings by a first-past-the-post (FPP) vote, but the other vote goes to your preferred party. A party's percentage of the party vote roughly determines its percentage of legislative seats. Each party publishes a list of candidates who would be called on to serve should its popular vote be larger than the number of local candidates elected.
And why in the world would we want that to happen? Possibly because every majority government in Ontario since 1937 has been an artificial one.
For kicks, let's take as example 1999, when the Harris Tories took power for the second time, winning 57 per cent of the seats but netting only 45 per cent of the popular vote. The Liberals got 35 seats, the NDP nine, but if their seats had matched their popularity, that would have been 41 and 12 respectively, and things might have been different for the province then – and for Toronto today.
We might ask, too, if McGuinty would rule with such holy complacency if the numbers lined up. In 2003, the Liberals earned less than 47 per cent of votes but ended up with 70 per cent of the seats.
The greatest impact would have come from a shift in the political landscape that's hard to picture under present conditions. Under MMP, parties with enough support – 3 per cent of the vote – get a leg up and don't suffer from strategic voting. You can select your local Liberal candidate to hedge against a strong Tory opponent (or vice versa) but still vote conscientiously (Green, NDP – even Freedom, whatever it is) with your party vote.
In New Zealand, "vote splitting" happens on about one-third of ballots. "All sorts of people who previously never would have been chosen as candidates by the major parties were elected, and they changed the character of Parliament," Withers says .
"The fresh new parties, basically people who might have been doing NGO work or social work or working in professional businesses, they ended up in Parliament." In New Zealand, the Green party is taken seriously.
Couldn't groups with vexatious or regressive platforms but honed PR send a bunch of unaccountable hacks to Queen's Park as well? Most of them would presumably continue voting Tory, but what of the truly extremist?
Not to worry, says Withers. In New Zealand, the prevalence of multifaceted minority governments and the power of the party vote to make or break a party means extreme positions are isolated quickly, and consensus is key.
"Be humble. Work with others. Play nicely. Learn to cooperate," says Withers. "It's all the stuff we teach on the playground, but somehow the politicians have given themselves a free pass."
And as for accountability of list MPPs? "They're not going to be at Queen's Park making tea for the party boss," he says. "What they will be is all over Ontario, using the resources and the status of the office. Imagine how effective members might be if they didn't have to spend half their time in a local riding kissing babies." Withers crows that the system encourages us to be less "parochial."
Now, honestly, I kind of like being parochial; real power starts locally, at the bottom. But since the province isn't going away any time soon and does wield a lot of power over my city, how might the proposed system stack up for Toronto?
Well, if 2003 had been an MMP election, the makeup of the legislature would much more closely resemble the spread of votes in Toronto. The city would have sent a couple of Tories to Queen's Park, whereas there's currently no one in the party to speak for the city. (This could have made a life-or-death difference during the Harris years.) Nor is there presently any consistent urban voice across all three parties.
MMP could even allow Toronto to send its own independent MPP to Queen's Park. Or, if the 3 per cent threshold proves a bit high for that, there could be an Urban Alliance Party (I leave it to the wonks to find a better name) with at-large members responsible for concerns shared across the burgeoning southern Ontario megalopolis: transit, housing, concentrated poverty, sustainability.
MMP supporters say the system means senior governments are less likely to be seen as the enemy. Personally, I'll settle for an enemy that's easier to manipulate. Either way, it would be lovely to leave the voting booth feeling a little less dirty.
"At the end of the day," says Withers, "representative democracy is about representation. It's not about electing a government. Government is the by-product."
Broken-down ballot
Cashless bid for proportional rep could go bust
By GLENN WHEELER
The yes campaign for proportional representation on which so many hopes are pinned is confused, underfunded and short-staffed, a sign that Liberal strategy is playing out exactly as planned.
There's a growing sense among fans of MMP (mixed member proportional) that the referendum is over before it has really begun and that energy for change is better spent elsewhere.
Certainly, the feeling at Yes provincial campaign HQ at Queen and Spadina is less than ebullient. Larry Gordon, manager of the Yes team, says he has volunteers working across the province trying to sway the electorate in favour of PR. He's not sure how many, perhaps 500 to 1,000 barely more than a large riding campaign.
The nub of the problem is that the Liberal government, after funding the Citizens Assembly on Electoral Reform that generated the voting proposal, decided it would provide no monetary support for the MMP referendum effort itself. This, in the government's view, is the way to preserve the non-partisan citizen nature of the referendum campaign.
But the result has been a people's movement struggling to compete for attention amidst the noise made by big-dollar party campaigns.
Gordon, for example, has started begging online for contributions of $10.10 for victory on election day, October 10. "We are a grassroots organization running a grassroots campaign," he tells me.
So shouldn't politicians supporting MMP do some noisemaking themselves? Turns out this is more complex than it seems.
Gordon himself hasn't encouraged the parties to get more involved. "Democratic renewal is not a partisan issue," he insists. "In downtown Toronto, the party that's penalized the most (by the current system) is the Tories."
Of the three major parties, only the NDP officially supports the proposal. Though that puts the party on the side of the angels, it does mean it's in a delicate situation.
On the one hand, concerned NDPers, knots of whom you'll find at party events, are asking worriedly how badly they think the referendum campaign is going and whether Howard Hampton should be doing more to push the dream that looks increasingly likely to stay exactly that.
On the other hand, if the NDP leader is too vocal, he might give MMP the kiss of death. The challenge, many NDPers reason, is to favour the proposal without inadvertently making it appear that MMP is a socialist-Green plot. One of Hampton's handlers says the leader responds to questions when asked, but won't likely make MMP one of the six key campaign planks.
Individual candidates are pushing MMP as best they can. In Beaches-East York, Michael Prue says he's been getting an average of three calls a day asking about the MMP plan, as hot as issues get in an election campaign.
But besides the positioning issue, there are Elections Ontario rules to contend with. An Elections Ontario official explains to me that parties can express their point of view on MMP, but only groups registered as Yes or No committees can actually ask people to vote for or against the proposal.
The NDP, party organizers say, is doing as much as it can under the election expenses law.
The Yes side's burden got a little heavier last week when Publications Ontario (the provincial printing service) stopped printing and distributing bulk copies of One Ballot, Two Votes, the pamphlet of the Citizens' Assembly on Electoral Reform.
Now, not only does the Yes team have to haul in the votes, but it also has to do the educational backfill it assumed mass distribution of the pamphlet would take care of all on a budget of just over $30,000, the amount raised through donations.
Marco Monoco of the government's Democratic Renewal Secretariat tells me that 500,000 copies of the pamplet have been distributed, and while no more will be printed, it is downloadable from the Internet.
Wading through the Queen's Park media labyrinth seeking answers, I'm shocked by what I'm forced to explain. "What is the Yes team?" one staffer asks. I find myself having to give a primer on the referendum process. If even the media thingies are barely aware of what this is about, what hope is there for the ordinary voter?
The confusion may all be good news for the Grits. Way back in 2003 when they campaigned on democratic renewal, PR seemed like a good way to keep despots like Mike Harris from ever again wielding unchecked power.
But then the Libs found themselves in government even though they received barely more than 40 per cent of the votes. When you're the beneficiary, the unfairness of the first-past-the-post system doesn't seem so bad. So when an all-party committee of the legislature recommended that MMP should be adopted if it received a simple majority, Dalton McGuinty's cabinet thought otherwise. It raised the requirement to at least 60 per cent of the votes in 60 per cent of the ridings.
"It's disgusting," sniffs Prue, the NDP critic for democratic renewal.
If by some fluke, MMP does pass, a Liberal government will certainly bring in legislation to make it happen, Health Minister George Smitherman tells me while canvassing in Toronto Centre-Rosedale.
Smitherman, one of the few leading Liberals to back the MMP option, says the NDP is spending too much time complaining about the referendum process and too little talking up the merits of MMP. "The 60 per cent threshold is appropriate for a change as significant as this," he says.
As for the cash-starved Yes side, Smitherman says the government's strategy has been to direct funds to Elections Ontario to provide non-partisan education about the referendum.
Meanwhile, he says he's four-square behind MMP, and his lit says so. "It would lead to a more representative legislature," he says. "Now, we don't have a single Aboriginal member."
It's a strategic position for a future Liberal leadership contender who wants to be associated with a progressive position on democratic renewal.
Perhaps the best we can do is console ourselves by seeing the expected outcome on October 10 not as defeat but as victory delayed.
Mark Your Ballot MMP
The referendum on October 10 will ask voters to choose between the current first-past-the-post system and a new mixed- member-proportional (MMP) one. Here's the dish on MMP:
• Voters cast two votes on one ballot, one for a local MPP as currently and one for their preferred party. The two votes can be for different parties.
• Parties need to get 3 per cent of the popular vote province-wide to qualify for at-large seats.
• Parties elect a list of at-large MPPs that is published before the election.
• The legislature consists of 129 seats: the current 103 local ridings are reduced to 90, and 39 seats for at-large party list candidates are created.
• If the number of a party's elected candidates is less than its share of the overall vote, it gets a top-up of MPPs.
And they call this democracy?
Not one of the candidates I have voted for has won
By MIKE SMITH
I've voted in every election I could, and not one of "my" candidates has ever won. By the logic of our democracy, I've had no voice, not even my own little decibel in someone else's.
Ontario expat and Fair Vote Canada member Steve Withers commiserates. "I started voting at 18," he tells me in the lounge of the progressive space called the Centre for Social Innovation on Spadina.
"I would've been better off going to the beach for all the effect it had – so that's my formative experience as a citizen of a democracy: my vote actually doesn't matter."
At 24, he left for New Zealand, where Kiwis were mulling a switch from the traditional first-past-the-post system to a proportional one – Multi-Member Proportional, or MMP. MMP got the nod.
Ontarians will be asked to consider the same on October 10, though you'd be forgiven for not knowing it. Withers came here to work with the Citizens' Assembly on Electoral Reform to get the word out, motivated by his experience in New Zealand. The change there, he says, "opened the floodgates to all sorts of ideas and possibilities that the previous system had simply blocked, precluded."
Under MMP, voters get one ballot and two votes: candidates are still elected in local ridings by a first-past-the-post (FPP) vote, but the other vote goes to your preferred party. A party's percentage of the party vote roughly determines its percentage of legislative seats. Each party publishes a list of candidates who would be called on to serve should its popular vote be larger than the number of local candidates elected.
And why in the world would we want that to happen? Possibly because every majority government in Ontario since 1937 has been an artificial one.
For kicks, let's take as example 1999, when the Harris Tories took power for the second time, winning 57 per cent of the seats but netting only 45 per cent of the popular vote. The Liberals got 35 seats, the NDP nine, but if their seats had matched their popularity, that would have been 41 and 12 respectively, and things might have been different for the province then – and for Toronto today.
We might ask, too, if McGuinty would rule with such holy complacency if the numbers lined up. In 2003, the Liberals earned less than 47 per cent of votes but ended up with 70 per cent of the seats.
The greatest impact would have come from a shift in the political landscape that's hard to picture under present conditions. Under MMP, parties with enough support – 3 per cent of the vote – get a leg up and don't suffer from strategic voting. You can select your local Liberal candidate to hedge against a strong Tory opponent (or vice versa) but still vote conscientiously (Green, NDP – even Freedom, whatever it is) with your party vote.
In New Zealand, "vote splitting" happens on about one-third of ballots. "All sorts of people who previously never would have been chosen as candidates by the major parties were elected, and they changed the character of Parliament," Withers says .
"The fresh new parties, basically people who might have been doing NGO work or social work or working in professional businesses, they ended up in Parliament." In New Zealand, the Green party is taken seriously.
Couldn't groups with vexatious or regressive platforms but honed PR send a bunch of unaccountable hacks to Queen's Park as well? Most of them would presumably continue voting Tory, but what of the truly extremist?
Not to worry, says Withers. In New Zealand, the prevalence of multifaceted minority governments and the power of the party vote to make or break a party means extreme positions are isolated quickly, and consensus is key.
"Be humble. Work with others. Play nicely. Learn to cooperate," says Withers. "It's all the stuff we teach on the playground, but somehow the politicians have given themselves a free pass."
And as for accountability of list MPPs? "They're not going to be at Queen's Park making tea for the party boss," he says. "What they will be is all over Ontario, using the resources and the status of the office. Imagine how effective members might be if they didn't have to spend half their time in a local riding kissing babies." Withers crows that the system encourages us to be less "parochial."
Now, honestly, I kind of like being parochial; real power starts locally, at the bottom. But since the province isn't going away any time soon and does wield a lot of power over my city, how might the proposed system stack up for Toronto?
Well, if 2003 had been an MMP election, the makeup of the legislature would much more closely resemble the spread of votes in Toronto. The city would have sent a couple of Tories to Queen's Park, whereas there's currently no one in the party to speak for the city. (This could have made a life-or-death difference during the Harris years.) Nor is there presently any consistent urban voice across all three parties.
MMP could even allow Toronto to send its own independent MPP to Queen's Park. Or, if the 3 per cent threshold proves a bit high for that, there could be an Urban Alliance Party (I leave it to the wonks to find a better name) with at-large members responsible for concerns shared across the burgeoning southern Ontario megalopolis: transit, housing, concentrated poverty, sustainability.
MMP supporters say the system means senior governments are less likely to be seen as the enemy. Personally, I'll settle for an enemy that's easier to manipulate. Either way, it would be lovely to leave the voting booth feeling a little less dirty.
"At the end of the day," says Withers, "representative democracy is about representation. It's not about electing a government. Government is the by-product."
